Ex-Financial Times Journalist Tom Foremski @ the Collision of Technology and Media

12

April

2010

|

09:43 PM

America/Los_Angeles

The Curation Buzz... And PearlTrees

My buddy Dave Galbraith is the first person I remember to first start talking about curation and the Internet, several years ago. He even named his company Curations, and created a tool/site for curation: Wists. And his site SmashingTelly - is great example of curation, a hand-picked collection of great videos.

Today, much is written about curation and the Internet but it all seems mostly talk because we don't really have the tools we need. Curation seems to be just a new way to describe things like blogging and "Editor's Picks."

"... who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0."

Reading Robert Scoble's post on curation, it almost seemed as if he were describing PearlTrees, a company I've recently been working with in an advisory role, when he talks about "info atoms and molecules."

...what are info atoms? A tweet is an atom. A photo on Flickr is an atom. A conversation item on Google Buzz is an atom. A Facebook status message is an atom. A YouTube video is an atom.

John Byrne, the former editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek, believes that curation will be a vital part of future successful media businesses. Curation is one of the three pillars of his new company: C-Change Media - Content, Curation, Community.

PearlTrees is the closest tool I've found so far, for effective and easy to create curation, which can be easily published and shared. I hope we get more curation tools because we need them.

I'm looking forward to working with the PearlTrees team and finding new ways of using the service. And please check out my PearlTrees when you come across them in various posts ... such as this one on "Curation."